Ext3 in my experience is just plain inferior to ReiserFS.
That's odd. My experience is just the opposite. I haven't done any stringent benchmarks or anything, but I have a couple of media directories on one computer that I rsync to another (so the contents should be identical). One computer is running ReiserFS and the other Ext3, though, and on the one running ReiserFS it takes around 5-10 seconds to list one of the directories when the caches are cold. The Ext3 computer does it in unnoticable time on cold caches.
Of course, the storage backing them isn't identical, but I think it should work to ReiserFS's advantage, since it is contained on normal 3.5" S-ATA disks in an LVM, while the Ext3 filesystem is on my laptop, which uses a 2.5" IDE disk.
It is worth noting that the disks aren't slow, because I used to have that filesystem using XFS instead, and at that time performance was a lot better. I did some basic benchmarking when I still had both filesystems alive simultaneously, with such elementary techniques as "time find/mnt", and found that XFS was more than an order of magnitude faster (I don't remember the exact results, though; it was a long time ago). The reason I switched was mainly to have something shrinkable before it got large enough that I couldn't switch filesystem again by adding enough capacity to be able to duplicate the filesystem.
I would actually have used Ext3 on it, had it had in-kernel support for online resizing. In my experience, Ext3 is just one of the best filesystems out there. The only major thing it lacks, in my mind, is indeed in-kernel support for online resizing.
One of my favorite bug hunts was when I found out the implementation difference in varargs between x86 and PPC: in x86, it is a pointer, which means changes in a called function don't propagate, while it is a pointer to a struct on PPC, which means changes do propagate -- thus the missing va_end only affected things on PPC.
Actually, you don't have to go as far as MIPS or PPC for that -- I discovered the same thing on x86_64. I reused the same va_list variable in two subsequent calls to vsprintf, which didn't make my program happy at all. I might suggest reading up on va_copy(3).
[...]she did say "teach both". You can't get much clearer than that.
Actually, you can be a lot more clear than that. Would it not be even strange if creationism would not be mentioned at all in schools, especially seeing how hot it is as an issue as such?
To me it seemed, especially after reading through the article linked to on Wikipedia as the source of her statement, that she simply hadn't thought about the issue in detail. She was speaking about how she thought how both sides should be debated, which I think is a good thing, since such a debate would surely bring out many interesting issues on the nature of science and knowledge themselves that students would be well served by understanding better.
As for teaching creationism in science classes or sociology classes, I just didn't think it seemed as if she had considered that part of the issue at all. While one could argue that she should have, it's not really that important a detail in this context, and as long as she realizes that and leaves the important decisions to better suited people, I don't think there's anything wrong with her staying ignorant on that particular point.
The Judeo-Christian religions get preferential treatment, usually with the justification of the historical context of religion of American settlers.
Well now, that alone doesn't seem very strange at all. After all, Christianity is and has been a lot more influential, than any other religion, on the development on culture and society in general, so I would think it strange if it didn't get any preferential treatment at all.
Sounds good to me. Let us start by teaching them about Tiamat, how she got raped to give birth to the elder gods, and how her head was crushed with a sledghehammer by her son to create the land.
And then other Assyrian/Babylonian myths, including the Judeo-Christian variety.
Let's not neglect the western varieties, like how the frozen milk from the cow Audhumbla created Burr, the father of Burin, the father of Odin, the all-father.
Don't they do that already? I don't know how it is in the U.S., but I certainly learned about that here in Sweden. Under the religion classes, of course, as it should be.
I'll have to respond to my own post, because actually, Wikipedia even has this to say:
In a televised debate, Palin supported allowing both creationism and evolution in public schools. The next day she clarified her position to one of allowing the debate of alternative views and not of having it in the curriculum.
I think that should alleviate any extraneous worries.
Well, in all honesty, it is kind of hard to tell from that article what it really is that she wants. I, too, think that creationism should be taught in school, and that debate should be encouraged. But not in any science-related classes, of course. That's what classes in religion are for, obviously. The article was very scant on details about how she thought it should be taught.
Even if it is true, the nice thing with a free operating system is that one can at least fix the bug oneself, support contracts voided or not. Try doing the same if there's a problem with Exchange or IIS.
That's great and all if you are an internet mechanic. But what if you just want to drive the damn car? For those people, who are the majority, those messages don't mean squat.
You know, before you drive a car, you're required to get a driving license. I've never really understood why people are expected to be able to use a modern computer system flawlessly without any education.
Or even better -- If the plug just had a few extra connectors, the device could (not unlike a USB device) have two resistors or similar statically hooked up that encode information to the charger regarding the voltage and minimum required current.
The manufacturers could ship a charger which only accepts gadgets with one particular requirement specification, while there could also be generic chargers available that could charge many devices with varying specifications.
You can *NEVER* establish identity with a self-signed cert.
That's not actually true, though -- you merely need to exchange the certificate identity beforehand. For example, if you walk into your bank office and ask for Internet banking access, they can give you a physical piece of paper with the correct certificate key fingerprint, which you can then verify manually when you go to your Internet banking website. Which is how cryptographic trust should work.
Gaining trust is subjective, and when you trust an authority, you implicitly effectively incorporate and endorse their verification methods them as your own.
Which is why the current system is not a very good one. Of all the 40+ certificate authorities that ship with any browser, it would be ludicrous to think that at least one of them would not either be untrustworthy or at least vulnerable to attack from real crackers. See Verisign, for example, which issues fake certificates to government agencies.
Therefore, I would argue that self-signed certs (or simply a PGP/GPG-like trust model) is far better than the current SSL scheme, which really can't be trusted at all.
If you dont like the secure desktop, then turn it off, exactly the same as you avoid using gksudo.
It's only the same if one isn't using an administrative account to begin with, which is next to impossible in Windows if one actually wants to get meaningful work done.
And yes, I know that's not NT's fault per se, but it's still Microsoft's fault for shaping their software community in that way.
There's simply no fix for stupid/lazy users. I'm stupid and lazy when it comes to Ubuntu. There is nothing you can do to change that because frankly Ubuntu is such a tiny part of my life that it's not worth the extra time and effort required to actually fully understand all the implications of every sudo command I type in. I don't keep any valuable data on my Ubuntu box. If it comes to it (perhaps because someone gains root access to my box and locks me out), I can simply reformat and reinstall Ubuntu.
You are right about that, but the difference between sudo and UAC does not even attempt to be in that aspect. The real difference is that it is possible to understand what a command does, and therefore what the implications of running it with sudo are.
UAC, on the other hand, does not share that property. It is quite often impossible to tell what any given UAC prompt does. If you are lucky, it will tell you the executable file name of the process trying to elevate its privileges. If you are less lucky, that file name will be "rundll.exe", which can do virtually anything. Normally, however, it's just a GUID. A 128-bit number that noone knows what it means.
So basically, while sudo doesn't attempt to protect a user from himself (which UAC tries to appear to do, but doesn't actually), it can be used by anyone skilled enough to ensure that system security is not breached. UAC doesn't really do anything useful at all.
It doesn't stop there, though. Running a command with sudo is a user-initiated action. You can pause, browse the web or man pages to check for details or edit the command. UAC, on the other hand, pops up at any time at the behest of some process and blocks the entire desktop while you decide, so you can't even check around what's happening. (It should be noted here that gksudo is just as bad, and I've never been a great fan of it. At least I don't use that vile program myself.)
I can remember which computer is 192.168.0.11 on my local network easily enough
Well, in all honesty, that's just easy because the 192.168.0.0/24 prefix is just standard, no? As for my local 6to4-based IPv6 network, I can easily remember the standard addresses that I've set, like 2002:52b6:8514:100::1, since "2002" is the standard 6to4 prefix, "52b6:8514" is just the hex encoding of my public IPv4 address, and "100" is a prefix that I've chosen for that subnet. Even if it were not easy to remember in itself, it gets stuck quickly in muscle memory. Sure, it may not be terribly easy to recite over a phone line or so, but how often do you do that with IPv4 addresses anyway?
It's certainly forward-thinking, but having (estimated) fewer atoms in the universe than IPv6 addresses available is just slightly overkill, doncha think?
Well, no. The reason for the large addresses is not so much just to have many addresses, but to arrange for simpler routing. In many ways, 128 bits may have been underkill. The last 64 bits are normally reserved for each local link (that may be considered overkill, though), so that leaves only 64 bits to arrange for hierarchical routing.
And that's really the primary reason for backbone providers to switch to IPv6, the way I've understood it. We're not even almost out of IPv4 addresses, after all, but not having to have routers capable of 100 000+ lines of routing tables because the address space is so fragmented seems to be kind of appreciated.
the bizarre thing about reading is that if you're reading for meaning rather than spelling, errors like this get 'error corrected' away at some level beneath the conscious one, particularly if you're reading stuff on the internet where most people are pretty sloppy.
I suppose 'Grammar Nazis' just never learn this skill.
Indeed, spelling mistakes can easily be overlooked (though I usually see them automatically nonetheless, sometimes up to a paragraph away). However, grammar mistakes are far harder to ignore, if I may say so.
When people mess up words like "your"/"you're" or "its"/"it's" (or "de"/"dem" in my native language, Swedish ("they"/"them" in English)), that takes me completely out of any reading rhythm I might have had, because the entire sentence need to be reparsed once I realize that it was a mistake I read, rather than a predicate (or the other way around). The same thing goes for bad punctuation.
If I were to guess, I'd say its the same kind of difference as there is between visually and audially* oriented people. Some people read the words for their pronunciation value, and parse the sentence from that, while others read words for their pictographical value, and parse the sentence from that. If so, it's not so much a matter of skill, but of one's dominant sense.
* Yes, I know that's not an accepted English word, but I'd like to introduce it.
Seriously, what's up with the Political Correctness Police Department around here? I would think that people on Slashdot would be able to take what is obviously a joke. Naturally, it would be another thing if he had written that and actually meant it, but surely, it cannot be mistaken for anything but a joke?
If I were to get more than a million readers somehow, would I also have to be politically correct in every word I speak? In that case, I'd rather not have a million readers to begin with.
Holy Shit! Usenet is dead. For some reason my Xnews, open right now, seems to not have noticed.
Maybe not, but if you're currently using Usenet, would you mind telling me how you got access? My ISP does not offer any Usenet access at all, and while there are lots of sites offering "access to all alt.binaries newsgroups with no bandwidth limit" for an admittedly rather reasonable fee, there must be some reasonable way to just get access to the discussion newsgroups.
I used a laptop with 64 MB of RAM until only recently, and the main reason I got a new one was to get built-in WiFi and Bluetooth. It's really not that great a problem, depending on your usage. For running Emacs and GCC and just generally hacking on some programs, it works just fine.
You'd need to use a simpler window manager, though, as Gnome or KDE is completely out of the question. I used Ratpoison, but I'd be surprised if, say, Sawfish or similar hadn't worked just as well.
The greatest problem, I'd say, is that there's no nearly modern browser capable of running on 64 MB. Firefox wouldn't even start before me growing a larger beard than I want. Opera was semi-functional, but not something I'd really recommend for the non-masochistic.
I think maybe he would suggest that people are free to not vote for a candidate based on their refusal to share their medical records.
Which raises the question: Maybe presidential candidates should never have to show their medical records and, by extension, one might even argue that it should be illegal for them to show their medical records. I can't say I'd go that far myself, but I do think it's a valid point, at least.
As for Jobs' condition, I do agree that it would be completely unreasonable to ask him to show his medical records. However, I also think that it would be completely within the bounds of reason to require him to make a statement of how his condition would affect his further governance of his company. In other words, he doesn't have to say that "I've got cancer", but rather that "I will go on unabated", or "I will remain as CEO, but I will diminish my influence for some months", or maybe even "I will resign within a month'.
There's a SPECIFIC MEMORY ADDRESS being locked out when booting Linux.
Actually, the author of the post is wrong about that. The second argument to the ACPI Acquire operator that he is speaking of as an address is, in fact, a timeout value. All the Acquire operations lock the same object: "MUTE". His changing the timeout to 0xFFFF indicates that the acquire operation should take as much time as it needs to wait for the mutex to be acquirable. Why the ASL compiler complains, I can only speculate around without access to the surrounding source, but it would seem that the warning actually refers to the return value of Acquire being ignored. Make no mistake, ignoring the return value of a mutex lock operation that can time out without acquiring the mutex is a serious bug, but it is not about locking out some specific address when booting Linux.
In fact, it is not even local to the Linux part of the DSDT. The author even stated that in his forum post: It is what happens when he recompiles the DSDT to use the Windows-specific table instead.
I can also only speculate around why this causes problems. I can imagine two obvious possibilities:
Windows' ACPI implementation might ignore the timeout value and always wait indefinitely. Therefore, changing the timeout value to infinity would cause Linux to do the same. However, even if it is Windows with its ability to constantly being able to surprise me with its stupidity that we're talking about, I don't think it would do something like that.
Windows' scheduler might work sufficiently different from Linux's scheduler that those timeouts simply never occur when running on Windows. Why the BIOS author would then care to specify timeouts at all is quite beyond me, however.
All that being said, though, if my assumption is correct and the BIOS author does indeed ignore the return value from a mutex lock that can time out is almost stupid enough to be unattributable to stupidity. Though, Einstein did once say that "Only two things are infinite: The universe and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the former.", and I'm willing to agree.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, are the two mutually exclusive by necessity?
Ext3 in my experience is just plain inferior to ReiserFS.
That's odd. My experience is just the opposite. I haven't done any stringent benchmarks or anything, but I have a couple of media directories on one computer that I rsync to another (so the contents should be identical). One computer is running ReiserFS and the other Ext3, though, and on the one running ReiserFS it takes around 5-10 seconds to list one of the directories when the caches are cold. The Ext3 computer does it in unnoticable time on cold caches.
Of course, the storage backing them isn't identical, but I think it should work to ReiserFS's advantage, since it is contained on normal 3.5" S-ATA disks in an LVM, while the Ext3 filesystem is on my laptop, which uses a 2.5" IDE disk.
It is worth noting that the disks aren't slow, because I used to have that filesystem using XFS instead, and at that time performance was a lot better. I did some basic benchmarking when I still had both filesystems alive simultaneously, with such elementary techniques as "time find /mnt", and found that XFS was more than an order of magnitude faster (I don't remember the exact results, though; it was a long time ago). The reason I switched was mainly to have something shrinkable before it got large enough that I couldn't switch filesystem again by adding enough capacity to be able to duplicate the filesystem.
I would actually have used Ext3 on it, had it had in-kernel support for online resizing. In my experience, Ext3 is just one of the best filesystems out there. The only major thing it lacks, in my mind, is indeed in-kernel support for online resizing.
One of my favorite bug hunts was when I found out the implementation difference in varargs between x86 and PPC: in x86, it is a pointer, which means changes in a called function don't propagate, while it is a pointer to a struct on PPC, which means changes do propagate -- thus the missing va_end only affected things on PPC.
Actually, you don't have to go as far as MIPS or PPC for that -- I discovered the same thing on x86_64. I reused the same va_list variable in two subsequent calls to vsprintf, which didn't make my program happy at all. I might suggest reading up on va_copy(3).
[...]she did say "teach both". You can't get much clearer than that.
Actually, you can be a lot more clear than that. Would it not be even strange if creationism would not be mentioned at all in schools, especially seeing how hot it is as an issue as such?
To me it seemed, especially after reading through the article linked to on Wikipedia as the source of her statement, that she simply hadn't thought about the issue in detail. She was speaking about how she thought how both sides should be debated, which I think is a good thing, since such a debate would surely bring out many interesting issues on the nature of science and knowledge themselves that students would be well served by understanding better.
As for teaching creationism in science classes or sociology classes, I just didn't think it seemed as if she had considered that part of the issue at all. While one could argue that she should have, it's not really that important a detail in this context, and as long as she realizes that and leaves the important decisions to better suited people, I don't think there's anything wrong with her staying ignorant on that particular point.
The Judeo-Christian religions get preferential treatment, usually with the justification of the historical context of religion of American settlers.
Well now, that alone doesn't seem very strange at all. After all, Christianity is and has been a lot more influential, than any other religion, on the development on culture and society in general, so I would think it strange if it didn't get any preferential treatment at all.
I'm still worried. She is [...] actually open to teaching religious dogma in science class! That is dangerous.
Only that, according to the Wikipedia article I linked to, she isn't.
Sounds good to me. Let us start by teaching them about Tiamat, how she got raped to give birth to the elder gods, and how her head was crushed with a sledghehammer by her son to create the land. And then other Assyrian/Babylonian myths, including the Judeo-Christian variety. Let's not neglect the western varieties, like how the frozen milk from the cow Audhumbla created Burr, the father of Burin, the father of Odin, the all-father.
Don't they do that already? I don't know how it is in the U.S., but I certainly learned about that here in Sweden. Under the religion classes, of course, as it should be.
In a televised debate, Palin supported allowing both creationism and evolution in public schools. The next day she clarified her position to one of allowing the debate of alternative views and not of having it in the curriculum.
I think that should alleviate any extraneous worries.
Well, in all honesty, it is kind of hard to tell from that article what it really is that she wants. I, too, think that creationism should be taught in school, and that debate should be encouraged. But not in any science-related classes, of course. That's what classes in religion are for, obviously. The article was very scant on details about how she thought it should be taught.
Even if it is true, the nice thing with a free operating system is that one can at least fix the bug oneself, support contracts voided or not. Try doing the same if there's a problem with Exchange or IIS.
That's great and all if you are an internet mechanic. But what if you just want to drive the damn car? For those people, who are the majority, those messages don't mean squat.
You know, before you drive a car, you're required to get a driving license. I've never really understood why people are expected to be able to use a modern computer system flawlessly without any education.
The manufacturers could ship a charger which only accepts gadgets with one particular requirement specification, while there could also be generic chargers available that could charge many devices with varying specifications.
You can *NEVER* establish identity with a self-signed cert.
That's not actually true, though -- you merely need to exchange the certificate identity beforehand. For example, if you walk into your bank office and ask for Internet banking access, they can give you a physical piece of paper with the correct certificate key fingerprint, which you can then verify manually when you go to your Internet banking website. Which is how cryptographic trust should work.
Gaining trust is subjective, and when you trust an authority, you implicitly effectively incorporate and endorse their verification methods them as your own.
Which is why the current system is not a very good one. Of all the 40+ certificate authorities that ship with any browser, it would be ludicrous to think that at least one of them would not either be untrustworthy or at least vulnerable to attack from real crackers. See Verisign, for example, which issues fake certificates to government agencies.
Therefore, I would argue that self-signed certs (or simply a PGP/GPG-like trust model) is far better than the current SSL scheme, which really can't be trusted at all.
If you dont like the secure desktop, then turn it off, exactly the same as you avoid using gksudo.
It's only the same if one isn't using an administrative account to begin with, which is next to impossible in Windows if one actually wants to get meaningful work done.
And yes, I know that's not NT's fault per se, but it's still Microsoft's fault for shaping their software community in that way.
It's not actually "proper procedure"; gksu is just a GUI wrapper for su or sudo, so that the user doesn't need a terminal to type the password.
There's simply no fix for stupid/lazy users. I'm stupid and lazy when it comes to Ubuntu. There is nothing you can do to change that because frankly Ubuntu is such a tiny part of my life that it's not worth the extra time and effort required to actually fully understand all the implications of every sudo command I type in. I don't keep any valuable data on my Ubuntu box. If it comes to it (perhaps because someone gains root access to my box and locks me out), I can simply reformat and reinstall Ubuntu.
You are right about that, but the difference between sudo and UAC does not even attempt to be in that aspect. The real difference is that it is possible to understand what a command does, and therefore what the implications of running it with sudo are.
UAC, on the other hand, does not share that property. It is quite often impossible to tell what any given UAC prompt does. If you are lucky, it will tell you the executable file name of the process trying to elevate its privileges. If you are less lucky, that file name will be "rundll.exe", which can do virtually anything. Normally, however, it's just a GUID. A 128-bit number that noone knows what it means.
So basically, while sudo doesn't attempt to protect a user from himself (which UAC tries to appear to do, but doesn't actually), it can be used by anyone skilled enough to ensure that system security is not breached. UAC doesn't really do anything useful at all.
It doesn't stop there, though. Running a command with sudo is a user-initiated action. You can pause, browse the web or man pages to check for details or edit the command. UAC, on the other hand, pops up at any time at the behest of some process and blocks the entire desktop while you decide, so you can't even check around what's happening. (It should be noted here that gksudo is just as bad, and I've never been a great fan of it. At least I don't use that vile program myself.)
I can remember which computer is 192.168.0.11 on my local network easily enough
Well, in all honesty, that's just easy because the 192.168.0.0/24 prefix is just standard, no? As for my local 6to4-based IPv6 network, I can easily remember the standard addresses that I've set, like 2002:52b6:8514:100::1, since "2002" is the standard 6to4 prefix, "52b6:8514" is just the hex encoding of my public IPv4 address, and "100" is a prefix that I've chosen for that subnet. Even if it were not easy to remember in itself, it gets stuck quickly in muscle memory. Sure, it may not be terribly easy to recite over a phone line or so, but how often do you do that with IPv4 addresses anyway?
It's certainly forward-thinking, but having (estimated) fewer atoms in the universe than IPv6 addresses available is just slightly overkill, doncha think?
Well, no. The reason for the large addresses is not so much just to have many addresses, but to arrange for simpler routing. In many ways, 128 bits may have been underkill. The last 64 bits are normally reserved for each local link (that may be considered overkill, though), so that leaves only 64 bits to arrange for hierarchical routing.
And that's really the primary reason for backbone providers to switch to IPv6, the way I've understood it. We're not even almost out of IPv4 addresses, after all, but not having to have routers capable of 100 000+ lines of routing tables because the address space is so fragmented seems to be kind of appreciated.
the bizarre thing about reading is that if you're reading for meaning rather than spelling, errors like this get 'error corrected' away at some level beneath the conscious one, particularly if you're reading stuff on the internet where most people are pretty sloppy.
I suppose 'Grammar Nazis' just never learn this skill.
Indeed, spelling mistakes can easily be overlooked (though I usually see them automatically nonetheless, sometimes up to a paragraph away). However, grammar mistakes are far harder to ignore, if I may say so.
When people mess up words like "your"/"you're" or "its"/"it's" (or "de"/"dem" in my native language, Swedish ("they"/"them" in English)), that takes me completely out of any reading rhythm I might have had, because the entire sentence need to be reparsed once I realize that it was a mistake I read, rather than a predicate (or the other way around). The same thing goes for bad punctuation.
If I were to guess, I'd say its the same kind of difference as there is between visually and audially* oriented people. Some people read the words for their pronunciation value, and parse the sentence from that, while others read words for their pictographical value, and parse the sentence from that. If so, it's not so much a matter of skill, but of one's dominant sense.
* Yes, I know that's not an accepted English word, but I'd like to introduce it.
You know firefox has a build in spell check these days, you might want to look into that
Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.
Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.
As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rare lea ever wrong.
Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect awl the weigh
My chequer tolled me sew.
If I were to get more than a million readers somehow, would I also have to be politically correct in every word I speak? In that case, I'd rather not have a million readers to begin with.
Holy Shit! Usenet is dead. For some reason my Xnews, open right now, seems to not have noticed.
Maybe not, but if you're currently using Usenet, would you mind telling me how you got access? My ISP does not offer any Usenet access at all, and while there are lots of sites offering "access to all alt.binaries newsgroups with no bandwidth limit" for an admittedly rather reasonable fee, there must be some reasonable way to just get access to the discussion newsgroups.
With only 128 MB of ram?
I used a laptop with 64 MB of RAM until only recently, and the main reason I got a new one was to get built-in WiFi and Bluetooth. It's really not that great a problem, depending on your usage. For running Emacs and GCC and just generally hacking on some programs, it works just fine.
You'd need to use a simpler window manager, though, as Gnome or KDE is completely out of the question. I used Ratpoison, but I'd be surprised if, say, Sawfish or similar hadn't worked just as well.
The greatest problem, I'd say, is that there's no nearly modern browser capable of running on 64 MB. Firefox wouldn't even start before me growing a larger beard than I want. Opera was semi-functional, but not something I'd really recommend for the non-masochistic.
I think maybe he would suggest that people are free to not vote for a candidate based on their refusal to share their medical records.
Which raises the question: Maybe presidential candidates should never have to show their medical records and, by extension, one might even argue that it should be illegal for them to show their medical records. I can't say I'd go that far myself, but I do think it's a valid point, at least.
As for Jobs' condition, I do agree that it would be completely unreasonable to ask him to show his medical records. However, I also think that it would be completely within the bounds of reason to require him to make a statement of how his condition would affect his further governance of his company. In other words, he doesn't have to say that "I've got cancer", but rather that "I will go on unabated", or "I will remain as CEO, but I will diminish my influence for some months", or maybe even "I will resign within a month'.
is there a miniPCI card available containing this chipset that I can plug into a little router board?
That just begs the question: What kind of a router do you have which takes miniPCI cards?
(Myself, I like to use an ordinary computer for a router instead, but it's still very interesting)
There's a SPECIFIC MEMORY ADDRESS being locked out when booting Linux.
Actually, the author of the post is wrong about that. The second argument to the ACPI Acquire operator that he is speaking of as an address is, in fact, a timeout value. All the Acquire operations lock the same object: "MUTE". His changing the timeout to 0xFFFF indicates that the acquire operation should take as much time as it needs to wait for the mutex to be acquirable. Why the ASL compiler complains, I can only speculate around without access to the surrounding source, but it would seem that the warning actually refers to the return value of Acquire being ignored. Make no mistake, ignoring the return value of a mutex lock operation that can time out without acquiring the mutex is a serious bug, but it is not about locking out some specific address when booting Linux.
In fact, it is not even local to the Linux part of the DSDT. The author even stated that in his forum post: It is what happens when he recompiles the DSDT to use the Windows-specific table instead.
I can also only speculate around why this causes problems. I can imagine two obvious possibilities:
All that being said, though, if my assumption is correct and the BIOS author does indeed ignore the return value from a mutex lock that can time out is almost stupid enough to be unattributable to stupidity. Though, Einstein did once say that "Only two things are infinite: The universe and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the former.", and I'm willing to agree.